Tag Archives: GooglePlus

Google announced a slew of identity and social updates today, most excitingly, the ability to browse users’ social paths. This happens after similar services recently blocking some folks from doing so, which tells you Google gave it due consideration and is committed to supporting this feature indefinitely.

Here’s how the authentication looks:

Now there’s a whole set of widgets and JavaScript APIs, but I was interested in the regular scenario for apps already using the “traditional” OAuth 2 dance. After asking on the G+ APIs community, I was able to get this running and I’ll explain how below.

Step 2. Scroll to the interactive part below and turn on OAuth 2.0 on the top-right switch.

Step 3. To the default scope, add a new one: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.login. That’s the magic scope that lets your app pull in social graphs.

Step 4. For userID, enter “me”. For collection, enter “visible”. (This collection property, representing circles/people the user can identify to the app, only has that one value at present.)

Step 5. Now hit execute and (as a test user) you’ll see the dialog shown at the top of this article. Then hit accept.

Step 6. I got a confirmation dialog saying “Clicking Confirm will let Google APIs Explorer know who is in your circles (but not the circle names). This includes some circles that are not public on your profile.” which is surprising as I believe circles are always private (for now), so I guess users will always see that. Accept it.

Step 7. The JSON response will now be shown below the form. It includes a top-level field called “items”, which is the list of your (the authenticated user’s) G+ people. If the list is too long, there will also be a “nextPageToken” field so the app can page through the list.

So that’s an overview of the new G+ social API. It’s a straightforward OAuth implementation and should be easy for anyone with a Google login to adopt. I’ve been looking forward to adding this functionality on Player FM so people can see what their friends are listening to … I think it’s a nice model where users can choose how much of their social graph they share with any app.

Background

I know RSS has been dead since 1982, but I’m still finding it very useful for powering status updates on my homepage (http://mahemoff.com). Whether Twitter, WordPress, Posterous, Lanyrd, Plancast, I know I can always scrape the most recent item with a one-liner.

It’s not clear if and when Google will release RSS feeds for Plus, though the comments there certainly indicate they’ve given it a lot of thought. There’s really too many variables to make speculation anything more than a fun discussion in the pub.

Fortunately, Russell Beattie has stepped up to make a third-party feed service, PlusFeed. but it seems to have been hammered in 2 waves: first, by an army of hungry feed bots; and second, by an increase in App Engine pricing. Even at this early stage, it’s costing $35/day, though there are probably optimisations possible as referenced in the comments. (UPDATE: Russell’s service is now offline due to the price whack, but the open-source project lives on. Follow the instructions here to roll your own for free.)

In any event, since I’m using PlusFeed for my homepage, I want to be sure it’s running, so I wondered about writing my own feed service. But in a second stroke of awesome, I don’t have to, as Plus Feed is actually open source.

Install A Feed Server on Google App Engine

It’s very easy to fork and deploy PlusFeed, even if you’ve not used App Engine before …

Download Russell’s project: git clone https://github.com/russellbeattie/plusfeed.git. (You may wish to fork it on GitHub so you can maintain your updates.)

You only need to make two changes – here you can see what I did. Specifically, change the project name in app.yaml to “whataplusfeed”. Then in plusfeed.py, replace the “idurls” regular expression with your own plus ID (the big number you see in your profile URL, e.g. https://plus.google.com/106413090159067280619/posts).

Import your project into the GUI, test it locally, and deploy it! Now your personal Plus feed is running at http://whataplusfeed.appspot.com/<your-plus-id>

You could easily whitelist a handful of IDs too, e.g. for all the staff in a company or a group of friends. Or you could just use the original project as is; it would make a nice public service, but unless a lot of others step up too, you’re going to be liable for big bucks once the feed bots find your server. In any event, you can choose which feeds are offered by providing an appropriate regular expression in plusfeed.py (step 3).

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I’m getting more convinced Plus is the new Twitter, and also the new Posterous. I’ve been posting things on there I previously would have stuck on the Twitter or the Posterous, and so it was time to integrate Plus on my homepage alongside the existing Twitter and Posterous links.

Latest Post

It was pretty easy to integrate my latest Google Plus post (we don’t really have a name for a Plus post yet; a plust?), as I already have a framework in place for showing the last post from an Atom or RSS feed.

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I’m on Google+ and I’ve mostly found it pretty decent in the ~2.5 weeks I’ve been using it. (Also had an opportunity to do dogfood before it went live, but really, it’s a different world once it’s out there and being used for real, so that’s what this post is about.)

Thought I’d sum up my experiences to date. You’ll notice a lot of my comments compare it to Twitter, because after all the crowd has been similar so far. And honestly, I often find myself with something to write and having to decide whether to stick it on T, G, or both. The decision feels kind of arbitrary right now and will probably shift to G over time, unless Twitter gets its innovation seriously on …

The Good

Things to like about Google Plus …

The UI! I’ll call out the design first because it’s not been Google’s strong point in recent years. Yes, clean white pages were a breath of fresh air in 1997, but getting long in the tooth now, and Google Plus shows Google’s now getting serious about visual design, and beyond just statistical hue calibration.

Engagement. The overall experience leads to much higher engagement than I’ve seen with blogging, twitter, or anything else. For the big guys, you see literally dozens of comments in the first few minutes.

No size limit. You don’t have Twitter’s 140 character limit. Fortunately, Twitter taught us the benefits of brevity, so it’s very acceptable to write just a sentence or two. But you can still go all out with an entire paragraph and that’s fine too. And no more shoehorning txt,just 2fit the arbtrary char limit.

Comments. Compared to Twitter, I actually have all responses to my status in one place. On Twitter, there’s no UI to see all the responses to a tweet; you have to view them all individually. The comments also facilitate a conversation, whereas on Twitter, you’d end up with multiple tweets and no decent UI (save third parties perhaps) to view the whole conversation.

Mentions. Similar to Twitter @ mentions, but because of the comments, + mentions have more of a feel of being summoned into a conversation. It’s certainly easier to get the entire context of the conversation in which you’ve been mentioned.

Search. <rant> Seriously a shambles about Twitter is the inability to search through tweets. I can’t even search my own tweets!!! This was one of my initial motivations for using posterous, figuring I’d pipe everything through it. And same reasons others use identica, etc. The problem is you don’t get all the clients, e.g. Tweetdeck. So I ended up sending a lot of tweets which I can’t actually search through. They fall off Google and they fall off Twitter’s own search. It has constantly amazed me that a company in constant search for a revenue stream doesn’t have a full history of content available.</rant> Now, with Google Plus, there’s no search either, but at least advanced users have the option to search using site:plus.google.com. And in all likelihood, we can assume Plus will have search too. (Although Android search shows Google + Search is not a foregone conclusion of excellence…but Plus’s virtues to date promise good things.)

Hangouts. I think the concept of video hangouts is immense, as opposed to just standard VC, and will be a great asset for remote teams. (I know some teams already just keep an open skype session running all day.) However, I’m speaking out of my speculatum because I haven’t yet tried it, for reasons explained below.

Updates. The team is doing a great job of engaging with the community, listening to the feedback, and making updates. They’re doing a great job if the worst controversy is closing down accounts of sophisticated tech companies blatantly flouting the rules by setting up corporate accounts, complete with filling in their first name, surname, and gender.

Android App. A fine production.

The Bad

Things not to like about Google Plus, keeping in mind it’s still in “field testing mode” (“beta” is so web 2.0) …

Circle statuses aren’t public. The problem is I want my Twitter-like geeky status updates to be public, but not contaminate the streams of my non-geek friends and family. There’s no good solution for this right now. If I publish a geeky status update to my “webdev” people, they will get to see it, but it won’t be public. If I publish it to “Public”, everyone in my circles sees it. Right now, I’m opting for “Public”, and if others are doing likewise, their non-geek friends and family will freak out the first time they join Plus and run fast in the opposite direction.

No groups. A lot has been said about whether circles themselves are a good idea, given that people’s relationships are nuanced and dynamic. But what interests me more than circles is groups. I’m really hoping Google somehow merges Google Groups with Plus; private groups would be particularly powerful for workgroups. The cool thing about groups, like what Facebook has but few people use is: (a) compared to circles, the visibility model is easily understood and predictable – someone can see messages if they’re in the group and can’t see them if they’re outside the group…simples! (b) you don’t have 100 people all adding the other 99 to the same circle and all micromanaging their circles to stay in sync – the owner just adds everyone once…this saves a lot of hassle, it works better for mainstream users who can’t or won’t micromanage circles, and ends up with a single source of truth.

Comments UI. As I mentioned on + Comments UI works for the average Joe with a handful of comments. But for Scoble etc, they are reedeeculous! 100+ comments in an hour? With no threading. It’s a mess to read and removes much of the incentive to post anything. This stuff is write-only. Since comments are +1able, G+ should let the popular ones float to the top, or perhaps display them with the others being collapsed. There are some other good suggestions in the comments to the aforementioned + post.

Comments and Sharing. The problem with sharing is people will comment on the sharer, not the original. I think it makes sense for everyone to be commenting in the same space, or at least for some easy summary view. I think this is Google being initially biasing towards privacy measures to avoid adverse reaction, but it does lead to comments being even harder to follow.

Finding hangouts. I can’t. Maybe that will change now that PlusRoulette is here! Or not. I also hope Google adds the ability to record hangouts at some stage. Lightweight video podcast ftw!

No metadata. I get it. Statuses don’t have titles or keywords or anything else because people are lazy and sites that don’t realise that won’t go mainstream. So Google’s being smart here. But that said, for my own use case, there are times when I’d love the ability to tag a post with “announcement” or whatever, so I can later have a feed of those. Anyway, I guess one can work around it by including some hashtag-like token in the actual status. Just making that point, though I realise my own use case is not that which Google is targeting – it seems the lesson has been learnt from Wave et al that Googlers and assorted geeks shouldn’t always be the target audience.

Okay, that’s me done. I’m enjoying Plus and I’m hoping it spurs Twitter and others to build on the awesome. Are you using it? Any other goods and bads?

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G’Day

Welcome to Michael Mahemoff's blog, soapboxing on software and the web since 2004. I'm presently using HTML5 and the web to make podcasts easier to share, play, and discover at Player FM. I've previously worked at Google and Osmosoft, and built the Ajax Patterns wiki and corresponding book, "Ajax Design Patterns" (O'Reilly 2006).
For avoidance of doubt, I'm not a female, nor ever have been to my knowledge. The title of this blog alludes to English As She Is Spoke, a book so profoundly flawed it reminded me of the maturity of the software industry when this blog began in 2004. I believe the industry has become more sophisticated since then, particularly the importance of UX.
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